Using Screen to emulate tabs
Screen1 is a wonderful tool which allows to use just one terminal emulator to launch multiple interactive shells.
The idea I had is the following : using screen and xterm together, it is possible to have a tabbed terminal emulator (hype, but so useful), and moreover, one can simply detach the session and reattach it later. Of course, there are a few annoying things:
- having to call screen when opening a new xterm
- having to exit screen and then hafing to exit xterm (except if one does a pow detach, but you don't always think about it
- the key bindings are logical, but they are not intuitive (there exist simpler bindings that C-a c, C-a p and C-a n to, respectively, spawn a shell, go to the previous one, go to the next one…)
There is a solution to each of the points I've stated. First, to change the key bindings, we have to edit the .screenrc. In order to find the keycodes, a $ cat followed by the keys you want will do great. Here is a extract of my .screenrc
bindkey ^[[1;5D prev
# ctrl-right : next
bindkey ^[[1;5C next
# ctrl-down : spawn a new shell
bindkey ^[[1;5B screen
Once this is done, it's just a matter of modifying the .bashrc:
alias xtermds="DISABLE_SCREEN='1' xterm"
if [[ $TERM == 'xterm' ]]; then
# not in an xterm, do nothing
if [[ $DISABLE_SCREEN != 1 ]]; then
# if $DISABLE_SCREEN = 1, do nothing
if [[ `screen -list | grep "Detached" | wc | awk ' { print $1}'` == 0 ]]; then
# if there is no detached screen, create a new one
screen
else
if [[ `screen -list | grep "Detached" | wc | awk ' { print $1}'` == 1 ]]; then
# if there is a single detached screen, reattach it
screen -r;
else
# if there are several, reattach anyone of them
screen -R $(screen -list | grep "Detached" | head -n1 | sed "s/\..*//g" | awk '{ print $1 }');
fi;
fi;
# wait until screen returns
wait
# and close the xterm
exit;
fi;
fi;
Now we have a tabbed xterm, which calls screen by itself, quits when we exit screen and has usable key bindings. And yet it is still possible to have screenless xterms (useful to ssh somewhere and have a distant screen).
- GNU screen [↩]
2 Responses to "Using Screen to emulate tabs"
Sympa tes petits tutoriaux pour Linux.
Je suis étudiant en 3eme année de licence info, et il se peut que j'ai un jour besoin de ce genre d'infos, donc merci
Perso, j'ai Kubuntu d'installer, vu que c'est sans doute l'une des distributions les plus faciles a prendre en main, et dès que j'aurais un peu plus d'expérience, j'essayerais tes tutos
Si tu veux tout savoir, j'étais l'année dernière en L3 d'info fondamentale, et avant ca je n'avait pour ainsi dire jamais vraiment utilisé linux, donc pas d'inquiétude à avoir, ca vient tout seul.
Et ce ne sont pas tant des tutos que des trucs sur lesquels je me suis un peu pris la tête, et donc que je partage
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